Dear devs: Plus signs are valid
I have been trying to use a '+' sign in my e-mails to separate accounts into aliased folders for a few months now, and about half of all services that accept an e-mail address think that the plus sign is an illegal character. It's not!
If you implement an e-mail validator, please follow the RFCs and don't just throw together a regex that you think looks good. Here are some pages explaining the RFCs:
- https://jkorpela.fi/rfc/822addr.html
- https://www.mailboxvalidator.com/resources/articles/acceptable-email-address-syntax-rfc/
9 comments
[ 17.5 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadThe world won't change because you say so. Just use a dash to separate your constituent parts instead of a plus sign, and you won't have that problem ever again.
(I know someone who has been complaining about exactly this for more than twenty years now. Surprisingly it never seems to get old for him. Some people just need a "standard complaint".)
Foo+anything@ goes to foo@. This is an easy way to track who's selling your email.
Not every complaint you don't understand is invalid
UniCode 'Confusables' Visual-Spoofing: https://unicode.org/reports/tr36/#visual_spoofing
The Invisible JavaScript Backdoor: https://certitude.consulting/blog/en/invisible-backdoor/
<quote> There are many other characters that look similar to the ones used in code which may be used for such proposes, (e.g. “／”, “−”, “＋”, “⩵”, “”, “⫽”, “꓿”, “∗”). Unicode calls these characters “confusables”. </quote>
That + behavior is pretty standard and not related to google only.